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Lot Essay
Hardships Lead to Precision:
The Art of Zhu Yunming’s Cursive Script Calligraphy
Born into a family of scholars and officials, Zhu Yunming started practising calligraphy and composing poems at the age of five and nine respectively. His pupilage with the calligrapher Li Yingzhen (1431-1493) led to his marriage with Li’s daughter.
Although Zhu became a provincial graduate in 1492, his failure in subsequent examinations hit him so hard that he channeled his frustrations through poems and calligraphy. Poems in Cursive Script was executed in the winter of 1521 when Zhu was 61 years old. A handscroll of almost six metres long, it consists of ten seven-character poems composed by the artist. Written in fast and rhythmic brushstrokes, each vertical row has five to six characters whose ink gradations and shapes vary according to the angle, pressure and speed of holding and wielding the brush. At times the characters are accentuated with dots and elongated lines, sweeps, ticks or turns, which link the whole piece of calligraphy together and create a breath-taking visual-spatial composition. The Song scholar Ouyang Xiu once said: “hardships lead to precision ”, and Poems in Cursive Script is a very good example.
This handscroll was once in the collection of Wang Li (1616-1692), a scholar-official of the late Ming and early Qing period. Three of his collector’s seals appeared on this work can also be found on a handscroll of cursive script calligraphy by Feng Fang, now in the Tianyige Museum in Ningpo, Zhejiang province. The modern artist Xu Bangda (1911-2012) also inscribed a colophon at the end of the handscroll, stating that it was an authentic work shown by Shuyang.
The Art of Zhu Yunming’s Cursive Script Calligraphy
Born into a family of scholars and officials, Zhu Yunming started practising calligraphy and composing poems at the age of five and nine respectively. His pupilage with the calligrapher Li Yingzhen (1431-1493) led to his marriage with Li’s daughter.
Although Zhu became a provincial graduate in 1492, his failure in subsequent examinations hit him so hard that he channeled his frustrations through poems and calligraphy. Poems in Cursive Script was executed in the winter of 1521 when Zhu was 61 years old. A handscroll of almost six metres long, it consists of ten seven-character poems composed by the artist. Written in fast and rhythmic brushstrokes, each vertical row has five to six characters whose ink gradations and shapes vary according to the angle, pressure and speed of holding and wielding the brush. At times the characters are accentuated with dots and elongated lines, sweeps, ticks or turns, which link the whole piece of calligraphy together and create a breath-taking visual-spatial composition. The Song scholar Ouyang Xiu once said: “hardships lead to precision ”, and Poems in Cursive Script is a very good example.
This handscroll was once in the collection of Wang Li (1616-1692), a scholar-official of the late Ming and early Qing period. Three of his collector’s seals appeared on this work can also be found on a handscroll of cursive script calligraphy by Feng Fang, now in the Tianyige Museum in Ningpo, Zhejiang province. The modern artist Xu Bangda (1911-2012) also inscribed a colophon at the end of the handscroll, stating that it was an authentic work shown by Shuyang.